Japanese text faces for every mood, ready to copy with one click — happy, crying, furious, lovestruck, and the immortal shrug. Each cell holds the complete kaomoji as a single string, so one click copies the whole face, spacing and arms included.
Upbeat faces for good news, greetings, and celebration. The ‿ curve and ▽ mouth do most of the smiling.
From a quiet frown to full waterworks. The ╥ and ಥ eyes read as streaming tears.
Mild irritation through full table-flipping rage — and the polite response that puts the table back.
Hearts, kisses, and blushing faces for crushes, couples, and appreciation posts.
For when you have no idea — including the one shrug the whole internet knows. Its left arm is a real backslash, and copying from here keeps it intact.
Click any character to copy it, or use the section buttons to copy groups.
Kaomoji (顔文字, literally 'face characters') are Japanese emoticons read straight on, without tilting your head — unlike Western smileys like :-) that lie sideways. They grew out of 1980s Japanese computer forums, where users discovered that the enormous character sets needed for Japanese text made far more expressive faces possible than plain ASCII. A single kaomoji borrows freely across writing systems: ツ is the katakana character tsu, the disapproving ಠ eye is a letter from the Kannada script of southern India, and ╯ and ┻ come from box-drawing characters designed for sketching tables in text terminals. That mix is what gives kaomoji their range — thousands of distinct faces, all in plain text.
Because kaomoji are ordinary Unicode text, they work almost anywhere emoji do and in plenty of places emoji do not: usernames, game chats, stream titles, commit messages, and bios on Instagram, Discord, X, and TikTok. They also never change design between platforms — an emoji can look different on iPhone and Android, but (＾▽＾) is drawn by your font, character by character, exactly as you pasted it. The one catch is font coverage: a face that borrows a rare letter can show an empty box on older systems whose fonts lack that script. The most popular faces stick to safe characters, and everything on this page uses widely supported ones.
A few of these faces became internet institutions. The shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ spread through Reddit and Twitter in the early 2010s as the universal gesture of cheerful resignation; the table flip (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ and its patient counterpart ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ), which sets the table back down, turned into a call-and-response ritual. Nobody types these by hand — the shrug alone mixes a macron, a katakana letter, and a backslash — so copying is the normal way to use them. One warning: in apps that use Markdown, such as Discord and Reddit, the shrug's backslash can be eaten as an escape character, so if the left arm goes missing, paste it again or add a second backslash.
It is Japanese for 'face characters' — kao (顔) means face and moji (文字) means character. The name covers the whole family of upright Japanese emoticons, from simple faces like (＾▽＾) to elaborate scenes with arms and props. Western sideways smileys like :-) are emoticons too, but kaomoji are read without tilting your head.
Each face is built from characters across many scripts — katakana, Kannada, Greek, box-drawing symbols — and a device can only draw the ones its fonts include. Modern phones and browsers cover nearly everything, but older systems, some TVs, and game consoles miss the rarer scripts, so one exotic eye can turn into a box while the rest of the face survives.
Realistically, you do not — it combines a macron, a backslash, an underscore, and the katakana letter tsu, which no regular keyboard layout offers together. The practical route is to copy it once and save it as a text replacement (typing 'shrug' expands to the full face) on iOS, Android, or macOS.
No. Emoji are single pictographic characters drawn as little images by each platform, so the same emoji looks different on iPhone and Android. Kaomoji are strings of ordinary text characters — your font renders them identically everywhere, they work in text-only fields, and you can edit them, mixing eyes and mouths to invent new faces.
Usually, yes. Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and X all accept kaomoji in display names and bios, and gamers use them in tags constantly. Strict handle fields that allow only letters and numbers will reject them, and a few platforms strip unusual characters — if a face gets mangled, try a simpler one built from common symbols.